32 LIFE AND HER CHILDREN. 
slime animals are the invisible scavengers of the ocean 
and the pools, and in earning their own living they 
also work for others. When you look upon a still 
pond in some quiet country lane, the insects you see 
swimming about in it, and the plants which cover it, 
are not the only inhabitants, but on its surface and in 
its silent depths minute specks of slime are living and 
working though no eye can see them. Beautiful and 
wonderful, however, as these forms are, they are yet 
very low in the scale of life ; they live and increase 
in multitudes, but in multitudes also they die and are 
devoured. Delicate, and frail, and helpless, they are, 
as it were, but first attempts at the results which 
life can accomplish. Let us pass on and see the 
next step towards higher and, in many ways, more 
ambitious creatures. 
